General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAnd so it begins. Some farms already have produce rotting in fields due to lack of workers.
About 3 weeks ago an announcement was making the rounds on the internet. Some farm in California offered $11/hour, for 12 hours per day, 7 days a week, for a 3-month contract.
Now a photo from a farm in Homestead, Florida, is making the rounds. Row after row of tomato-bushes, heavy with fruit waiting to be picked, decaying in the blazing sun.
The choice is simple: Either food-shortages or wage-increases for farm-workers.
My guess was and still is that the Republicans will propose using prisoners for slave-labor. Because the capitalist law of supply-and-demand is only valid for making wages go down, not for wages going up.
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lapfog_1
(31,890 posts)what could possibly go wrong???
Javaman
(65,685 posts)there will next be state voucher programs, which, in the long run will destroy what little is left of education by then.
there will be millions of kids that will be short changed and parents who, after the vouchers have run out, won't be able to afford this corporate run brainwashing machines for kids.
what to do?
put them to work. and put them to work as you as 8 or 9 years old.
they days of childhood labor is screaming back into republican vogue.
enid602
(9,678 posts)No big deal. There are currently no foreign buyers lined up to purchase the produce. In two months there will be no domestic demand for the produce, as unemployed Americans will have no money to purchase food. Genius Trump has it all figured out.
Squaredeal
(730 posts)The problem is that increasing costs, e.g. labor, equipment and the multitude of things associated with the growing and bringing produce to market will offset any benefits that restrictive import taxes bring to bear. Assuming that farmers are able to change their business plan and what they grow in the immediate term, they still will see a diminished profit as consumers purchases decrease due to higher food prices.
BoRaGard
(7,591 posts)won't put any bread and butter on our tables.
Stupid. Mean and stupid. Stupidly mean.
There's your Latter-Day republicons for you,
always acting to repudiate the teachings of Christ,
then sneering, claiming they are More Holy Than Thou.
RJ-MacReady
(603 posts)And for any factory work that comes back (lol yeah right) $30 minimum.
nitpicked
(1,804 posts)((The number may expand. And we COULD see "rent a prisoner" on farms.))
questionseverything
(11,802 posts)
druidity33
(6,912 posts)not sure about CA, but in some states farm work is exempted from some wage requirements and age restrictions.
GoCubsGo
(34,890 posts)They make them work in factories, making things like our cheap clothing. Wasn't Trump just screaming about Dems being the evil Commies? He and his party are no different than the CCP that they tell us all to hate.
Snarkoleptic
(6,235 posts)Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights, and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance -- unless, that is, you traveled back to the nineteenth century when convict labor was commonplace nationwide. Indeed, a sentence of "confinement at hard labor" was then the essence of the American penal system. More than that, it was one vital way the United States became a modern industrial capitalist economy -- at a moment, eerily like our own, when the mechanisms of capital accumulation were in crisis.
progressoid
(53,145 posts)
mucholderthandirt
(1,783 posts)Free labor, make them earn their keep! LOL It's the only solution, no one is going to work 12 hour days, day after day, in the hot sun, for $11. You can make more than that working for McDonalds, or Walmart.